Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Maria Porges reviews Walter Robinson: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. What are we to think about an Egyptian funerary boat powered by[…..]

From our sister site Art Practical, today we bring you a review of Lalla Essaydi’s photographs now on view at at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco. Author Danica Willard Sachs notes that in Essaydi’s work, “the effect of the ceremonial fabrics and calligraphy is to flatten the women into almost abstract images that retreat into the background like furniture.” This article was originally published on February[…..]

Mythos: fantasy, fiction, legend, saga, parable, fable, narrative, invention, fabrication, yarn. The conceptual distance between myth and the concrete manifestations of mythology is a potentially endless—yet meaningfully orderable—list of synonyms. But with each word the gap shrinks, as mental images of processes and then objects emerge, even if just as puns. Wendy Given is bridging the gaps between the abstract idea of a mythos and[…..]

Can you remember the last time you were really excited about seeing your local museum’s pre-modern permanent collection? Familiarity is the antagonist for the seasoned art viewer, and growing weary of a permanent collection becomes inescapable. Perhaps this is excusable in the case of a small collection in a provincial museum—but quite a different thing when the collection bills itself as the nation’s definitive authority[…..]

The constructions of Israeli-born artist Michelle Segre—towering webs of yarn, wire, and organic matter—resemble dispatches from another planet or totems of some long-lost civilization. Unfinished and roughly made, her work still evidences painstaking attention to detail, a ritualistic practice in which all the constituent elements impart shrouded, mystical meaning. A small show of her most recent work, currently on view at Derek Eller Gallery, expands[…..]

It seemed entirely appropriate that my journey to see Wondermountain at the Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers Bequest was through rain, a concrete landscape of freeways and overpasses obscured by my windscreen wipers. I arrived beside the swollen Nepean River, the Blue Mountains shrouded in mist, reflecting on the continuing importance of shanshui (mountain/water) painting. A poetic approach to representing landscape evolving from the Tang Dynasty, the[…..]

#commerce #place-making #policy #class #gentrification With their leases recently terminated, the mid-sized galleries at 77 Geary Street in San Francisco are the latest casualties of the massive wealth divide that plagues contemporary American society. Gallerists George Krevsky, Rena Bransten, and Mark Jawgiel were notified that their month-to-month leases would be discontinued to make space for technology company MuleSoft to expand into the building’s second floor.[…..]